“And I don’t suppose it does the department a lot of good.”
“I know a couple of guys got commendations for the work they did bagging Sadecki. What I just called him and Holtzmann, sleeping dogs. Maybe we could let ’em lie. I don’t suppose Zoot’s gonna bring up the subject. He can’t be that stupid.”
“No.”
“How about you, Matt? Could you let it be?”
“It’s up to the client,” I said. “Let’s see if I can sell it to him.”
I made the call from my hotel room, got Tom Sadecki at his store. I ran it down quickly for him and he listened without interrupting. When I had it all laid out I said, “Here’s where you have to make a decision. As it stands, the shooter may or may not stand trial for the murder of Roger Prysock, and if he does he may or may not be convicted. That depends on how good a case they can make against him. My guess is he’ll either plead or stand trial, because the case is still fresh and they’ve got eyewitnesses, but it’s too early to say for sure what will happen.
“If we try to connect the killer to Holtzmann and go public with what we have, it might weaken the case against him for Prysock. The most it could accomplish is to clear your brother’s name. You told me a while ago that didn’t matter, but you’ve got the right to change your mind if you want.”
“Jesus,” he said. “I thought I was done with all this.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I can’t answer that,” I said. “It’s easier for me if you let it go, and God knows it’s easier for the cops, but the only real consideration is what you want, you and your family.”
“George didn’t do it? You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “Early on it was very important for me to believe that, and then it became important to just let go of it, you know? And now it looks as though I was right in the first place, and I’m glad to know that, but the importance isn’t there anymore. Like the whole business doesn’t have anything to do with George, or with any of us.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“We’d just be putting him through it all over again, wouldn’t we? Clearing his name. He doesn’t need his name cleared. Let the world forget him. We remember him. That’s enough.”
“Then we’ll just let it lie,” I said.
I called Lisa. I said hello and she said hello, and she waited for me to invite myself over.
Instead I told her how her husband had been shot to death by someone who’d mistaken him for a pimp. “The case won’t be reopened,” I said. “The only person who might have wanted it was George Sadecki’s brother, and he’s decided against it. God knows the cops would rather leave well enough alone, and so would we.”
“So it doesn’t change anything.”
“It ties off the loose ends,” I said. “And it’s reassuring to know Glenn wasn’t killed by someone he’d informed on, or somebody he was trying to set up. But in practical terms, no, it doesn’t change anything.”
“It’s funny the way he had a premonition.”
“If that’s what he had. Maybe he was working on something he thought might get him killed, and maybe it would have if the pimp hadn’t gotten him first.”
We talked some more. She asked me if I wanted to come over.
“Not tonight,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”
“Get some sleep.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
I hung up the phone. I walked over to the window and stood looking out of it for a few minutes. Then I picked up the phone and made another call.
“Hi,” I said. “Okay if I come over?”
“Now?”
“Did I pick a bad time?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I said, “I really want to see you. I’m exhausted, I haven’t been to bed since the night before last.”
“Is something the matter?”
“No, but I’ve been busy. But I suppose it can wait until tomorrow.”
“No,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s all right,” she said.
Chapter 25
“He was killed by accident,” I told Elaine. “That’s how it looked from the beginning, that’s how the police saw it. A guy from the twenty-eighth floor in the wrong place at the wrong time, a guy in a suit taking a walk on the wild side.
“They thought he ran into George Sadecki, and no matter how hard I tried I could never completely rule that out. But there was something wrong about Glenn Holtzmann, and the more I learned about him the more likely it seemed that he’d furnished somebody with a much better reason to kill him than poor George ever had. And the killing certainly felt purposeful to me. That last shot into the back of the head didn’t seem characteristic of a mugging gone wrong, or a panhandler turned nasty. It was an execution. It was the sort of thing you don’t do unless you damn well want somebody dead.”
“And that’s what it was after all,” she said.
“That’s exactly what it was. Nicholson James had what he must have felt was a very good reason to take out Roger Prysock, and that’s what he thought he was doing when he killed Glenn. Then, when George shuffled along to take the rap for him, he must have felt God was watching over him. And of course he never went and told anyone what he’d done, because shooting the wrong fellow by mistake isn’t good bragging material in the bars. He’d killed a stranger and another stranger was in custody for it, so it was the easiest thing in the world to pretend it never happened.
“Then Prysock turned up, figuring it was safe to come home, and Nicholson James found out about it and hit the Replay button. Same M.O., pay phone, three in the chest and a coup de grâce, only this time he got the right guy.”
“And nobody made the connection?”
“No reason they should,” I said. “There have been close to five hundred homicides in the five boroughs between Holtzmann’s murder and Prysock’s. Most of those have come as the result of gunfire, and a lot of them have taken place on the street. The similarities are striking, but you only see them if the Holtzmann killing is in the forefront of your mind, and every cop involved had other things to think about. Remember, Prysock was killed on the other side of town. Nobody on that case had had any connection to the Holtzmann case. And don’t forget, Holtzmann’s death was history. The case was closed, the perpetrator had not only been arrested but he was actually dead and gone. If you found a husband and wife murdered with an ax, you might think of Lizzie Borden. But you wouldn’t try to make a case against her.”
“I see what you mean.”
“There was really only one person around who should have heard the penny drop. That was me, because I never really bought the idea that George did it. And, no matter how many homicides there’d been in the past few months, I had only one of them on my mind. So if anyone was going to draw a connection between Holtzmann and Prysock, it was me.”
“And you did.”
“No,” I said, “that’s the point. I didn’t. The report of the Prysock killing ran in all four local papers, so I read it at least once. I obviously read it, because I remembered it a couple of days later. It even rang a bell, but I managed not to hear it.”
“Why?”
“Because I went conveniently deaf. Irish deaf, my aunt Peg used to say. That’s when you don’t hear what you don’t want to hear.”
“Why didn’t you want to hear it?”
“I’ll tell you how I overcame my Irish deafness, and that should give you an idea of what caused it. After I left here last night I went to the midnight meeting at Alanon House. Then I went over to see Mick.”